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My Mint Story: I Paid Off $40,000 in Debt

Four years ago, we found ourselves almost $40,000 in debt. It was a scary, dark place. We hated talking about money and we certainly didn’t know how to dig ourselves out.

That was right about the time we found Mint. We also took a personal finance class and with both of these tools, we were able to pay off all our debt in 23 months.

Mint has provided a detailed road map of our entire financial life in one place. We started using Mint because of its sleek interface and robust features. It also allowed us to keep track of all our financial accounts in one place online.

How We Use Mint.com

We use a cash envelope system, so our ATM withdrawals show up as lump transactions in our Mint account, which makes it harder to track where the money is being spent.

If you have mostly electronic transactions, this won’t be an issue for you. If you use mostly cash, you can still use Mint and split each ATM transaction into various categories, or use a spreadsheet like we do.

Alerts: We use alerts for bank fees. We love this!

In fact, it was Mint that alerted us when our old bank began charging us a $10 monthly fee. After that, we switched banks.

Goals: We’ve created savings goals to help keep us focused. Our saving goals currently include retirement, college, finishing our basement and saving for a car.

Ways to Save: Every so often I take a peek at the Ways to Save section to see if there are any great deals out there. So far, we haven’t made any changes because the feature has mostly recommended services that we’re happy with or don’t need, like credit cards.

Net Worth: This is my favorite part of Mint! I love seeing how much our net worth has gone up as we cleaned up our debt and started saving and investing.

Here’s a look at how our net worth has changed since we’ve started tracking it over the past four years:

Our home value has gone down, but we’ve also paid off almost $40,000 in consumer debt and saved six months worth of expenses, so we’re not letting that discourage us.

We look forward to continuing to watch our net worth rise on Mint in the years to come.